Saving Francesca

I see familiar faces from Stella’s inside the house, and they wave from a distance.

“So, who are you hanging out with?” Natalia asks as we sit on the front veranda, while guys hang around, perving. These guys are different from those at Sebastian’s. They are actually more interested in us than each other.

“Siobhan Sullivan and Justine Kalinsky?” Michaela teases, and they all groan.

I force a smile and laugh. “The Perpetua girls are really cool,” I say, not exactly lying.

“Who are the other girls?” a Pius hanger-on asks.

“Siobhan Sullivan is the biggest slut in the whole wide world,” Teresa, the Queen of Hyperbole, tells them. “Francis used to hang out with her in Year Seven.”

They call me Francis, by the way. “Just to keep you simple,” they’d tell me.

“I swear to God, this girl never shut up before we met her. Even the teachers would say, ‘Francis, enough of these questions.’ ”

“Once in Year Seven on an excursion to Manly, we were on the ferry coming back and next minute she’s on the bow of the boat screaming out, ‘I’m the Queen of the World,’ ” Simone says.

“And remember, we thought, what a psycho?” Natalia says, as usual ending all her sentences up in the air. “And you got suspended, Francis? And the school wanted you tested for ADHD and your mum went berserk?”

Faintly.

“And then Siobhan Sullivan went away for a couple of weeks and we thought, let’s make friends with her, because I think this girl needs saving.”

When Siobhan Sullivan’s grandfather died in Year Seven, she went up north to stay with her nan. They were the loneliest days of my life. Not one person would let me hang out with them. “It’s because you’re a show-off,” my future friends explained to me gently. “If you stop showing off, we’ll be your friends.”

“And we made her ours,” Michaela says, hugging me to her affectionately.

That’s what my friends do. They’re press agents. They give me publicity, and for three months at Sebastian’s I haven’t had any, so it’s a bit of a relief to be on the news again.

“And the other girl?”

“Justine Kalinsky, poor thing. She came new in Year Eight. Do you remember in Year Eight?” Natalia asks the others.

“Oh my God, Year Eight. Yeah,” Michaela says.

“This one time in Year Eight we had to write on butcher’s paper how we’d like people to see us. Remember ours? We were like, ‘We don’t want people to see us as leaders or heroes or anything out of the ordinary. We just want them to see us as on their level.’ ”

“But Justine Kalinsky gets up there, on her own, poor thing . And she says, ‘I’d like people to see me as their Rock.’ ”

“And we killed ourselves laughing.”

“Poor thing.”

“What did she mean?” the Pius girl asks.

“Who knows.”

I don’t dare mention Tara Finke. Sluts and losers are tolerable to my friends. But a person with a social conscience is from Pluto. Once in Year Nine, Mia forced me to go to the Palm Sunday peace march and I had to walk alongside Tara Finke. Our photo got into the school news, and I didn’t hear the end of it for ages.

A group of girls walk up the garden path and my friends scream and join them, leaving me with the Pius hanger-on, who confides that if it weren’t for my friends, she’d be lost.

“They saved me from having to hang out with the losers,” she tells me with pride.

“That’s what they do,” I explain politely.

We smile at each other with nothing left to say.

It’s a good night.

When I see Justine Kalinsky at school, I feel guilty, as if I’ve spent the whole weekend bitching about her.

“Tara’s talking to them about a basketball game.” Justine Kalinsky is giggling with excitement.

I sit at my desk, listening to Eva Rodriguez and the rest of the Perpetua girls being persuaded by Tara Finke.

“It’s the best idea ever,” Justine Kalinsky says, beaming.

“Can you arrange it?” Eva Rodriguez asks.

It takes a moment to realize that they’re talking to me.

“Me?”

“Justine reckons you’ve already set up communication with one of the House leaders.”

Justine Kalinsky’s face is lit up in anticipation.

“Which one?” one of the other Perpetua girls asks.

“Trombal,” Tara Finke says.

The girls are impressed.

“I don’t think he actually likes dealing with her,” Tara Finke says. “But if we send someone new, he’ll interpret it as a lack of leadership on our part. Let’s be consistent.”

“Plus we can’t send someone with a strong personality because the guys will get defensive. She’s perfect,” Siobhan Sullivan says. She’s enthusiastic about something for once, probably because it means getting into Lycra in front of a bunch of boys.

“It’s not competitive. Just call it a friendly senior basketball game. It’ll give us some kind of profile.”

“They’ll slaughter us,” one of the other girls argues.

“I play rep,” Eva Rodriguez tells us. “Plus our school won the Eastern Region last year and five of us from that team are here.”

“Ours got to the finals in the I

“I think it’s a great idea,” Tara Finke says. “This is our foot in the door, and we should grab the opportunity and show them that we have the ability to take control of our lives at this school.”

They all look at me.

How can my weak personality resist such a challenge?

William Trombal and the other leaders have a little office just outside Administration.

I stand out front for a moment or two and hear music coming from inside. I knock on the door and walk in. He’s in there with another two House leaders, and they all look up for a moment.

“Yours?” one of the House leaders asks him, smirking at me. I look away for a moment, concentrating on the poster of two league stars with bloodstained faces hugging each other.

“I’ll see you later,” I hear Trombal tell the other guys as they walk past me out the door.

When we’re alone, he sits back in his chair and turns down the music.

“I’m not going to get into a discussion about a tampon machine,” he tells me bluntly.

I don’t respond, and he looks at me and holds up one hand as if to say, What?

So much for Ms. Qui

“The girls would like to arrange a game with the guys.”

“We don’t play netball.”

“Basketball.”

He gives a laugh, but he’s not laughing with me.

“I don’t want to sound patronizing, but we won the CBSA finals last term.”

“Just a goodwill game,” I explain.

“We wouldn’t want to hurt you,” he says. “The guys can be aggressive.”

“Tell them it’s friendly.”

He thinks for a moment, looking me straight in the eye.

Don’t look away, I tell myself. But then I regret not looking away, because I feel my face going red and I don’t know why.

“Who’s your captain?” he asks.

“Eva Rodriguez.”

“Good-looking girl who looks like Je

I’m poker-face cool and it’s killing me, but I don’t say anything. He fishes something out of his pocket and I notice that it’s our list of requests, and I can’t help being surprised that he has it on him. He opens it up and reads down the list, and for a moment I see the paper flap, as if the hand holding it can’t control itself, and then I realize that William Trombal is nervous.

I’m making him nervous.

“Request number four,” he says, reading from the list. “An opportunity to play competitive sports.”

I nod, as if I know exactly what request number four is.

“Why not?” he says with a shrug.

I hold out my hand to shake on it. Luca and I do that all the time, and for a moment I feel so childish, but I’m too embarrassed to retrieve the hand.

“No complaining if anyone breaks a nail?” he asks, looking at my outstretched hand, but he doesn’t extend his.